07 June, 2007

The summer starts here

I finished my last exam yesterday, which couldn't have gone better, so I'm free for the next four months. The nicest thing about the end of exams is that I no longer have that feeling of guilt whenever I pick up a non-course-related book - it's nice to feel I can read anything I want. Went straight to the library after my exam and got out lots of books that weren't about German philosophy or French literature of the Enlightenment.

At the moment I'm reading Imelda Whelehan's Overloaded: popular culture and the future of feminism, for my women's group, and this weekend I'm going to try and finish Life and fate, finally. I'm now making lists of all the things I want to read over the summer, including some of the reading for next year's course on Realism and the 19th century novel. I've already read Madame Bovary but have never read any Stendhal or Balzac, so that should be interesting.

Oh, I'll read Sentimental Education, good idea. Then I can be the suck-up student who's read more than the reading list. Can't remember whether the Stendhal is Le rouge et le noir or La Chartreuse de Parme. The course is on only four novels for the whole year, so I guess it'll be pretty intense.

Only 4 novels for the year? I got stuck in the Charterhouse of Parma, but liked Le Rouge et le Noir. I think Woody Allen namechecks Sentimental Education in Manhattan as one of the supreme achievements of Western art. Not a perfect recommendation, but it is very good. Madame Bovary's just too cruel. Thanks for the congrats. Planning my next challenge now...